In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [29]
The many fictional inner journeys available to us—those that unfold in imaginary places—also come equipped with maps. Think of the mandatory maps at the fronts of those 1930s country-house murder mysteries, with the library and the conservatory and the servants’ wing, or the maps included in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy and those in The Lord of the Rings; and more, and more. Indeed, a great many more. It does seem to be a rule as well that when there are wars or murders involved—anything requiring strategic planning and the movement of opponents or aggressors toward their targets—maps are a conceptual help, not only for the reader but for the writer.
Indeed it would seem that quite a few writers think cartographically, especially writers about imaginary places. If you’re writing about a real city, a well-known one, the maps of it already exist and the reader can look them up, but if you’re writing about an unknown location, they don’t. The writing of Treasure Island began with Stevenson’s drawing of a map, as an effort to amuse a young visitor. It was not until after he’d sketched in some buried treasure and a few landmarks that Stevenson began writing the story proper, and the book’s journey began with that very same map being discovered in the sea chest of dead pirate Billy Bones.
As ustopia is by definition elsewhere, it is almost always bracketed by two journeys: the one that transports the tale-teller to the other place and the one that transports him (or her) back so he can deliver his report to us. Thus the writer of the book always has to come up with a mode of transport. When utopias were placed on islands, the journey was a simple matter of a sea voyage, and then of some sort of rescue by boat. Journeys underground involved tunnels, and ropes, and falling down holes, and the sudden breaking through of stone walls; return journeys took luck, scrambling up cave walls, the following of an animal that knew an escape route, or a version of Ariadne’s thread. Locations in outer space necessitated spaceships.
As for journeys to the future, which require transport not through space but through time, one could always fall back on that medieval gimmick, the dream vision, a form of psychic teleportation; or some kind of time machine; or a long sleep, like Sleeping Beauty’s or Rip Van Winkle’s. (Looking Backward and A Crystal Age both use this one: in the latter, our time-travel reporter bangs his head and wakes up far in the future, charmingly covered with little tree roots.) It’s this convention that Woody Allen is satirizing in his film Sleeper when he crawls out of a freezer covered in tinfoil.
Once “the future” became an established location, writers could feel free to jettison the travel episode and the “reporter” figure, and to plop the reader right down in the midst of things. “It was a bright cold day in April,” begins Nineteen Eighty-Four, “and the clocks were striking thirteen.” The “reporter” function exists in the book not as a person but in two texts within it: a book forbidden by the ruling Party of 1984, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Party arch-enemy Emmanuel Goldstein—who may or may not exist—and “The Principles of Newspeak,” an essay on language-as-control that we read after the end of the story proper. It is this essay by an unknown reporter—in my belief—that travels to our own time and lets us know how things turned out.
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the “reporter” is replaced by the “Savage,” a man from outside the borders of the highly organized tech utopia whose views on life may be thought to have